How to build your Radar

You can create your own radar in two stages:

Get started

Step-by-step guide

1. Create

To use the BYOR tool, you’ll either need to create either a Google Sheet, or a hosted .csv file that’s publicly available.

The name of your sheet or .csv file name will be used as the title of your radar. Enter the column headers, and put your content into each column.

Here's an example public Google Sheet and a screenshot of the editable Google Sheet. This examples sheet is based on the blips from the most recent Radar — but because the BYOR tool doesn't account for blip positions, the end result may be different to the published Radar.

2. Link

If you’re using Google Sheets, you can create either publicly available or private ones.

For those that are happy to share their radar with our community, you simply need to create a publicly available Google Sheet. Here’s how to publish a Google Sheet.

In Google Sheets, go to "File", choose "Publish to the web..." and then click "Publish".

Close the "Publish to the web" dialog and copy the URL of your editable sheet from the browser. Don’t worry, this does not share the editable version.

3. Build

Help and FAQs

Here's a list of things to check if your data is not loading into the radar visualization service.

Do you have an 'ad blocker' enabled in your browser? In some cases, these can interfere with the BYOR tool, so if you're having problems, it's worth checking.

Is your Google Sheet published? If you're using a private Sheet, do you have the rights to authenticate?

Does your Google Sheet or .csv file have the following column headers? 'name', 'ring', 'quadrant', 'isNew' and 'description'. Check the spelling and case, they are case sensitive, and check there is no whitespace before or after.

Does the 'quadrant' column contain four quadrant names? There need to be exactly four quadrants. Our radar contains the quadrants 'Tools', 'Platforms', 'Techniques' and 'Languages & frameworks', but you can rename these to anything you want, as long as there are four in total.

Check that you have consistent spelling for the data you're using in the 'ring' and 'quadrant' columns.

The service provides some basic error handling that might help you solve the problem and you may also find further clues in the console. Please feel free to send us any feedback here.

Is my data public?

Yes, if you choose to make it publicly available and published via Google Sheets. Anyone who has access to or discovers the public URL will be able to view the information that you enter into your radar. ThoughtWorks will collect data on how the service is being used, the URLs generated and may access any information you enter into your radar. We may use and publish aggregated and anonymised data from all the radars created using this service if we feel that it is interesting or could benefit the wider tech community. For full terms and conditions please read our privacy policy.

If you choose to use the private sheet option, only those with permission to access that sheet will be able to see your information.

I don't want to share my radar with the tech community, can I host my own radar?

Yes, the visualization service is open source (AGPL-licensed) so you can fork our repository or download a copy and host your own radar that's private. You can find the project repository here.

How will the service develop? Will you be adding more features?

It’s currently in beta and provides just enough functionality to serve its purpose. We hope that it's useful to you and the wider tech community. If it proves popular and there's enough demand, we may introduce new features and additional services. Please tell us how you're using it and send us feedback here.

Credits

﻿Like many of ThoughtWorks’ best ideas, this service was inspired by work with one of our clients. Fotina Koutropoulos (PO/PM, BA), Emma Kitchener (Designer) and Fernando Freire (Developer) ran a session they called the platform agility radar and built the tool to visualize the output. Before this, both Bruno Trecenti and Brett Dargan had open sourced radar visualization tools. We are indebted to them for their work.